By ERIC PACE

Published: February 4, 1998

Roger L. Stevens, the real estate magnate, legendary Broadway producer and bravura fund-raiser who enriched Washington's cultural life by finding ways to create the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and by leading it for its first 17 years, died on Monday at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington. He was 87 and lived in Washington.

The cause of death was pneumonia, said John Gleiber, a longtime friend of Mr. Stevens and his wife, Christine. In 1993, Mr. Stevens suffered strokes that left him partly paralyzed and deprived him of much of his speech.

Mr. Stevens succeeded spectacularly at his three careers by combining the unflappable air of an ambassador with the heart of a gambler willing to take bold risks.

On Broadway he was known as a producer of many hits, among them ''West Side Story,'' ''Mary, Mary,'' ''Death Trap,'' ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,'' ''A Man for All Seasons'' and ''Bus Stop,'' and for introducing plays by such adventurous writers as Harold Pinter, Arthur Kopit and Tom Stoppard.

He came to the theater from the real estate world, where he was remembered as the man who led a syndicate that bought the Empire State Building in 1951 for a bit more than $50 million, then a titanic sum; he more than doubled his investment when he sold his interest in the building three years later.

In politics, he made a mark as chairman of the Democratic Party's finance committee in 1956, when Adlai E. Stevenson ran for President for the second time. In the area where the arts and politics intersect, he became a major figure. He was President Lyndon B. Johnson's special assistant on the arts and the first chairman of the 25-member National Council on the Arts, founded in 1964. He also got through Congress the legislation that set up the National Endowment for the Arts and was its first chairman.

In September 1961, in a theatrical season when Mr. Stevens was putting on more shows than any other New York producer, President John F. Kennedy made him chairman of the projected national cultural center for the performing arts in Washington and told him to make it a reality.

Steps toward founding the center had been taken while Dwight D. Eisenhower was President, but they were inconclusive, largely for lack of agreement about its goals, budget, site, design and other issues.

When Mr. Stevens took on the project, he had to start raising money from scratch. During the first months of that effort, ''I went to President Kennedy and said, 'I'm doing a bad job, and maybe you can get somebody else,' '' Mr. Stevens recalled. ''The President said: 'No, Roger. You've got the toughest money-raising job in the United States, and I want you to keep on doing it.''

After Mr. Kennedy's death, the center was declared a memorial to him and was given his name, which broadened the project's role and its appeal.

Eventually Mr. Stevens managed to raise much of the $30.6 million in private financing toward the $77.9 million cost of building the center.

By one means or another, he insured that the center, a terraced cultural showplace, rose beside the Potomac. ''It was a risk to come in and build this center and a risk to open it,'' he said in an interview. ''There have been nothing but risks in my life.'

Asked in the early 1980's how he had borne the political and financial worries of the days before the center opened, he replied, ''I couldn't; I had my first heart attack in 1970.''

The center's boxy architecture was a losing bet in the eyes of the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable. She wrote in 1971 that the design was ''a national tragedy'': ''a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture is buried.''

But the center's opening night that year got a different reception. Leonard Bernstein conducted the premiere performance of his ''Mass'' in the center's Opera House, and Mr. Stevens would say later that it was the most exciting evening he had ever spent in the theater. ''When it was finished,'' he recalled, ''there was silence for three minutes. Then everyone stood and applauded for half an hour.''

The center went on to become one of the most successful cultural institutions in the country, vastly increasing Washington's offerings in the performing arts. Senator Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island, said, ''It's changed Washington from a cultural outpost into a cultural center -- what a capital city should be.''

After the 1971 opening, Mr. Stevens oversaw the center's operations over two decades as top-ranking artists from all over the world appeared in its various performance spaces. He served as chairman, president and chief executive officer until 1988, when he stepped down.

Mr. Stevens worked for the center as a dollar-a-year man, accepting no salary. That arrangement gave him independence, he said. As chairman, he also made contributions to the center from his own pocket.

During the Nixon Administration, some criticism of Mr. Stevens's wheeling and dealing as the center's chairman was heard at the White House. After Mr. Stevens learned of that, he said to a friend, ''How the hell do they think it got built?''